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21. Navigating Duality: The Struggle for Self-Determination of Palestine and in Postcolonial Post-Westphalian Global Order

Author:
Janees Rafiq
Publication Date:
01-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Rest: Journal of Politics and Development
Institution:
Centre for Strategic Research and Analysis (CESRAN)
Abstract:
The Charter of the United Nations has postulated its faith in the international community to ensure prompt and effective action; however, the UN has failed to discharge its duties towards maintaining or restoring global peace and harmony through its specific powers, including the use of humanitarian intervention. The ongoing crises in Ukraine and Palestine have highlighted the sheer apathy and ineffectiveness of international law, particularly its capacity to enforce special powers for gross human rights violations in Ukraine and Palestine. Although both Ukraine and Palestine are entitled to self-determination, the West’s response has been starkly different for each. Ukraine has received extensive support from Western states, while in the case of Palestine, the occupying state appears to benefit from Western protection, despite the International Court’s characterisation of the situation as a potential genocide against Palestinians. This disparity raises critical questions about the impartiality of international law, which theoretically holds no bias among nation-states. The research paper is based on a doctrinal study of how, in a globalised world, powerful nations' divergent responses to conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine further illustrate duplicity and inconsistency. While it remains a vital tool, it is also susceptible to political biases rooted in colonial-era legacies, particularly visible in Western states’ selective responses. Addressing this issue requires confronting the remnants of a colonial mentality that persists within the Western application of international law. The author will focus on a fundamental question: how to decolonise the application of international law to ensure equitable treatment in situations like Palestine, where the application appears markedly different from Ukraine.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, United Nations, and Self-Determination
Political Geography:
Europe, Ukraine, Middle East, and Palestine

22. E-Waste as a U.S. Social Policy Challenge: Addressing Inequity, Governance Gaps, and Consumer Rights Through a Repair-Reuse-Regulate Framework

Author:
Cynthia Norgbey
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the most rapidly growing waste streams in the United States, creating pressing environmental, economic, and social challenges. The United States generates over seven million tons of e-waste each year, and has a largely unregulated system, with significant amounts of e-waste burned, landfilled, or exported to countries with weaker environmental protections. The current system is fragmented and inequitable, producing pollution, depleting resources, and perpetuating environmental injustice for both domestic and overseas communities. Without a unified federal policy, structural gaps harm consumers, communities, and the environment. The United States lacks enforceable right-to-repair laws, manufacturers face inconsistent accountability for recycling and reuse, and export loopholes allow toxic e-waste to be shipped overseas with minimal transparency. In contrast, countries in the European Union are modernizing their electronics economy through comprehensive laws that establish minimum standards for repair rights, data transparency, and producer responsibility. This paper proposes a Three-Pillar Strategy for creating an equitable and circular e-waste management system in the United States.: Repair: Enhance consumer rights and equity through national right-to-repair legislation, including requirements for parts availability, diagnostic tools, and restrictions on anti-repair practices. State-level laws in Minnesota and New York provide models. Reuse: Incentivize reuse and refurbishment at the federal level by formally recognizing it as a distinct category in the waste hierarchy, building infrastructure in schools and community institutions, and collecting consistent data on secondary markets. Regulate: Enact a national Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework with clear standards on takeback, design-for-recycling, and export transparency. This includes updating federal regulations and aligning U.S. law with the Basel Convention. The three-pillar approach addresses socially equitable sustainability at upstream, midstream, and downstream intervention points. Using qualitative content analysis of 23 policy documents, this paper analyzes how repair, reuse, and producer responsibility instruments are distributed across U.S. federal and state governance levels, identifying structural gaps from fragmentation and contributing to scholarship on environmental governance and extended producer responsibility. Building on these findings, the paper advances a three-pillar framework: Repair, Reuse, and Regulate, that calls for a federally coordinated approach integrating national right-to-repair legislation, reuse and refurbishment infrastructure development, and a comprehensive producer responsibility system to address these governance gaps.
Topic:
Governance, Regulation, Social Policy, Waste, Electronic Waste (E-Waste), and Consumer Rights
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

23. Piloting a Preventive Mental Health Assessment Intervention for Left-Behind Families in the Philippines

Author:
Do Minh Anh, Pragya Prachi, Anne Marie Teodosio Rey, and Wu Xiao
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
The negative psychosocial impacts of parental migration on left-behind children (LBC) presents an urgent opportunity for preventive care and systemic reform. In high-migration countries such as the Philippines, LBC face heightened risks of emotional distress, attachment disruption, and poor academic performance. The substitute caregivers, often extended family members, are frequently ill-equipped to provide consistent supervision and emotional support offered by parents. Despite growing concern, programmatic gaps persist due to limited data reporting and analysis on LBC and their caregivers. This paper recommends a scalable Mental Health Assessment and Screening Tool (MHAST) for LBC and their caregivers, integrated into the existing digital infrastructure of the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers (DMW). The intervention builds on the DMW Mobile Application platform to embed mandatory caregiver arrangement and link school-aged LBC (ages 5-17) to well-being assessments administered through schools. Using two standardized screening instruments from the Child and Youth Resilience Measure Revised (CYRM-R) and the Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI-22), these tools identify flags in emotional distress, psychological risks, and caregiving capacity to triage families into four tiers of need to activate interventions ranging from informational resources to referrals for specialized care. In partnership with schools, NGOs, and government agencies, this tool has the potential to operate at both service delivery and policy planning levels. It provides targeted support for LBC and caregivers while generating standardized, large-scale data on caregiving quality and child well-being. This data infrastructure strengthens evidence-based policymaking across child protection, labor migration, education, and public health domains. Its digital-first design and interagency implementation model ensure phased deployment and make the intervention replicable across various migration-affected contexts.
Topic:
Migration, Children, Mental Health, Resilience, Well-Being, and Digital Infrastructure
Political Geography:
Philippines and Southeast Asia

24. Transgressive Sexual Politics, Structural Homophobia: Wilders and Milei in the Global Populist Radical Right

Author:
Luca Ghislandi
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
This article examines how sexuality operates as a strategic instrument within the ideological configurations of the Populist Radical Right (PRR) by comparing Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Javier Milei in Argentina. Both leaders appear to challenge the PRR’s traditional sexual conservatism: Wilders by portraying himself as a defender of LGBT rights and Milei by performing a libertarian, sexually transgressive persona. Yet, both ultimately reproduce structural forms of homophobia. Drawing on discourse analysis, frame analysis, and process tracing, the paper argues that these seemingly divergent stances constitute localized rearticulations of the PRR’s core triad of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. Wilders’ “civilizational liberalism” weaponizes queer rights to define Dutch identity against a racialized Muslim “Other,” enacting conditional inclusion and rendering migrant and Muslim queer subjects invisible. Milei’s “libertarian anti-statism” fuses sexual libertarianism with anti-gender politics, using anti-elitist and market-oriented rhetoric to dismantle the state infrastructures that sustain gender and sexual equality, a form of institutional subtraction. Despite opposite performances–Wilders as celibate guardian, Milei as transgressive iconoclast–both mobilize sexuality to police the boundaries of citizenship, legitimize masculine authority, and reinforce exclusionary national imaginaries. The analysis situates these cases within broader global trends in the PRR, demonstrating that contemporary far-right sexual politics no longer depend on explicit moral conservatism but instead on the modernization of homophobia: maintaining inequality through the languages of freedom, tolerance, and civilization.
Topic:
Politics, Populism, Ideology, Radical Right, and Homophobia
Political Geography:
Europe, Argentina, South America, and Netherlands

25. An Indo-Pacific Lifeline? Outcomes of Canada’s Free Trade Agreements amid North America’s Economic Pull

Author:
Tito Almeida
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
Rising global protectionism has renewed Canada’s strategic imperative to diversify its trade beyond the United States, given its longstanding export dependence. While the Indo-Pacific remains central to Canada’s foreign policy and trade diversification ambitions, there remains limited consensus on whether the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement (CKFTA) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) have meaningfully increased Canada’s exports to partner countries. This study addresses this gap in the literature by estimating the impact of these agreements on Canada’s exports, and identifying which types of firms have driven these outcomes. Using a panel dataset of bilateral goods exports from 2010 to 2024 and estimating two-way fixed effects and difference-in-differences regressions, the article examines the short-term effects of Free Trade Agreement (FTA) implementation, while controlling for macroeconomic and institutional conditions in partner economies. Although statistically insignificant, this study found that Canada’s exports to high-income Indo-Pacific partners rose modestly after FTA entry, with SMEs recording the strongest gains. In contrast, it estimates Canada’s exports to middle-income partners declined across all categories of firms. With Canada aiming to double non-U.S. exports over the next decade, this article suggests that future studies on free trade agreements should continue to investigate partner countries’ levels of industrialization and the role of firms as drivers of export growth.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Economics, Exports, Protectionism, and Free Trade Agreements
Political Geography:
Canada, North America, and Indo-Pacific

26. Sovereignty in Exile: Deterritorialized Statehood and Adaptive Governance for Climate-Displaced Pacific Island Nations

Author:
Valerie Chua
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
For millennia, Pacific Island communities have thrived in profound interdependence with their natural environment, relying on the ocean and ecosystems for sustenance, cultural identity, and economic vitality. Today, climate change disrupts this delicate balance. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events accelerate ecosystem degradation and undermine the physical and economic sustainability of ancestral homelands. As land becomes uninhabitable, communities face mass displacement, forced to leave their homes—and even their countries—in search of safety. Because international statehood remains predicated on land possession, this loss of territory threatens to erase the legal standing, sovereign rights, and collective cultural identity of Pacific Island communities. This article advocates for the international recognition of deterritorialized statehood—a model in which nations retain their legal sovereignty, international recognition, and cultural-political identity without basing their legal claims on territorial possession. This model offers a pragmatic path forward for Pacific Island nations by addressing the realities of climate-induced displacement without compromising the sovereign self-determination of its people. To achieve this vision, the international community must work alongside Pacific Island governments to implement three key policy transformations: (1) legal reforms to secure sovereign recognition post-territorial loss, (2) institutional reforms to govern dispersed populations, and (3) community preparedness initiatives to ensure cultural continuity and political participation across diasporas.
Topic:
Climate Change, Sovereignty, Governance, Exile, and Climate Governance
Political Geography:
Pacific Islands

27. Resisting Digital Colonialism and Protecting Subaltern Agency in Africa

Author:
Sylvia Ayesu
Publication Date:
04-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:
School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:
As African states accelerate digital transformation, they do so within a global political economy of data, artificial intelligence, and surveillance technologies dominated by foreign corporations and external regulatory norms. This article examines how contemporary forms of digital colonialism, characterized by asymmetrical data extraction, technological dependency, and externally imposed governance frameworks, constrain political autonomy and reproduce historical patterns of domination. Moving beyond narratives of victimhood, the article foregrounds subaltern agency by analyzing how African governments and civil society actors actively resist, negotiate, and reconfigure these power relations. Focusing on three illustrative cases in Kenya—the implementation of the Data Protection Act, the diffusion of Chinese-built smart city projects, and the rise of civil society-led data justice movements—the article analyzes how power asymmetries are negotiated within contemporary digital governance. It argues that prevailing global Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data governance frameworks inadequately incorporate African political priorities, thereby reproducing dependency rather than enabling sovereignty. It concludes by proposing policy pathways to strengthen African digital self-determination, including regulatory capacity enhancement, safeguarding transparency in technology procurement, and promoting civic oversight.
Topic:
Political Economy, Science and Technology, Transparency, Self-Determination, Extractivism, Agency, and Digital Colonialism
Political Geography:
Africa

28. From Digitalization to Forest Pedagogy: Innovative Educational Pathways for Sustainable Development in Poland

Author:
Szymon Godawa
Publication Date:
05-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Nowa Polityka Wschodnia
Institution:
Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
Abstract:
Education for sustainable development (ESD) requires new forms of teacher preparation that combine theoretical knowledge with practical experience. The aim of this study was to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of workshop-based classes designed to develop micro-competences – understood here as narrowly defined, measurable components of professional competences that can be certified through micro-credentials in accordance with European Commission guidelines (2022). The research was qualitative in nature and was conducted within the interpretive paradigm. Participant observation and document analysis were applied, including thematic analysis of didactic commentaries following Braun & Clarke’s (2006) procedure. The study involved 70 fifth-year students of preschool and early school pedagogy, who participated in 15 hours of lectures and 15 hours of exercises dedicated to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Agenda. The results show that students significantly developed social competences (teamwork, empathy, communication), the ability to integrate theory with practice, and critical thinking regarding socio-ecological challenges. They demonstrated high readiness to implement educational innovations and to apply the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). However, deficiencies were observed in entrepreneurial competences, particularly in planning and initiating micro-enterprises, which indicates the need to strengthen economic and career education in teacher training. These findings confirm that well-structured, experiential ESD activities are an effective means of preparing future teachers for the challenges of the 21st century. They also highlight the need to supplement curricula with elements developing entrepreneurial and systemic thinking, which are crucial for building ecological social capital and promoting lifelong learning.
Topic:
Education, Pedagogy, Innovation, Digitalization, Sustainable Development, Credentials, and Experiential Learning
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

29. Resilience and Cross-Border Cooperation in Cultural Heritage Protection: The Lublin Triangle’s Response to Ukraine’s Cultural Crisis

Author:
Elżbieta Olzacka and Katarzyna Pasternak
Publication Date:
03-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Nowa Polityka Wschodnia
Institution:
Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
Abstract:
The article examines how Poland and Lithuania supported Ukraine’s cultural heritage during Russia’s full scale invasion and clarifies the Lublin Triangle’s primarily political, solidarity building function rather than an operational delivery role. Drawing on qualitative analysis of official documents, institutional reports, public communications, and stakeholder interviews, it evaluates cultural sector responses in 2022–2023 with attention to delivery capacity, coordination, and sustainability. The study finds that targeted aid to museums, archives, and memory institutions was provided chiefly through bilateral and institution to institution mechanisms, while the Lublin Triangle consolidated political messaging without generating rapid tools for cultural protection. Across cases, core contribution areas included logistics (protective materials and transport), training (emergency safeguarding and evacuation), documentation (damage assessment and digitization), and international advocacy (UNESCO aligned actions and anti trafficking guidance). The analysis underscores the need to institutionalize hybrid, apolitical arrangements that couple governmental legitimacy with the flexibility and resilience of civil society networks, mitigating vulnerability to political cycles and sustaining cultural heritage protection under wartime conditions.
Topic:
Museums, Resilience, Heritage, Cooperation, Protection, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Lublin Triangle

30. When Weak States Win: A Supermodular Game-Theoretic Account of the 2006 Bolivia–Brazil Gas Crisis

Author:
Rodrigo Lyra and Manoel Galdino
Publication Date:
07-2026
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (RBPI)
Institution:
Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (IBRI)
Abstract:
What if third-party involvement and economic interdependence, often assumed to foster compromise, are precisely what entrench escalation in international negotiations? This paper introduces a supermodular game-theoretic framework to explain how indirect third-party alignment and domestic political constraints can produce strategic complementarities that lock actors into rigid bargaining positions. Drawing on an analytic narrative of the 2006 Bolivia–Brazil gas negotiations, we demonstrate how Venezuela’s political and financial backing emboldened Bolivia to harden its stance, while Brazil’s capacity to respond assertively was neutralized by domestic audience costs, intensified by electoral pressures. The result was not mediation or de-escalation, but a contested equilibrium shaped by positive feedback dynamics. Our findings show that third-party support can strategically reshape payoff structures in ways that incentivize escalation, even under conditions of deep interdependence. This framework advances the study of international negotiations by modelling how escalation can emerge endogenously from the strategic structure of trilateral interactions.
Topic:
Gas, Negotiation, Crisis Management, Game Theory, and Supermodular Game Theory
Political Geography:
Brazil, South America, and Bolivia